News and Insights

French Budget Minister David Amiel said the state will hire sovereign AI providers such as Mistral to test public systems for security vulnerabilities, and that this excludes OpenAI. The decision came days after a breach at the tax authority affecting around 700,000 people. Jurisdiction is turning into a procurement filter, applied after an incident rather than in a strategy paper. Worth knowing which of your vendors would survive that filter.

Britain’s economy grew 0.4% in the second quarter and information and communication supplied almost half of it. Inside that, computer programming and consultancy rose 3.7%, computing and electronics manufacturing 10.7% year on year. So the measurable growth sits with the firms selling AI, not the firms using it. One economist attributes part of June’s rise to the World Cup and the weather. Adoption returns remain unmeasured.

Ryanair has added Google Cloud on a five-year deal, sixteen days after renewing AWS for five years. Chief executive Eddie Wilson calls the dual-cloud strategy infrastructure resilience, and against outage risk it is. Jurisdictional exposure is a different question, and two US providers do not answer it. The two contracts also cover separate workloads rather than mirroring each other. Worth watching whether European boards start telling those two risks apart.

OpenAI says preliminary evaluations of Astra, an unreleased model, cannot rule out the Critical cybersecurity level under its own Preparedness Framework. It has paused internal work that fails the strengthened controls and added isolated testing, encrypted weights and universal monitoring. No regulator required this. For EU organisations the point is evidential: so far the only safety case that exists is the vendor’s own unverified reading, published before the model reaches any market.

US nonfarm business productivity rose at a 1.4% annual rate in the second quarter, and 2.2% on the year. Output rose 1.7%, hours worked 0.3% and unit labour costs 1.3%. The release credits nothing to AI, because the series cannot separate one input from another. Revised figures follow on 3 September. Any AI business case leaning on this data is adding a claim the statistics do not carry.

Moldova’s Law 195/2024 takes effect on 23 August, bringing GDPR-style duties and a regulator with fining powers. Ceilings are 1 million lei or 1% of turnover for documentation and processor failures, and 2 million lei or 2% for serious breaches. DLA Piper puts 2 million lei at roughly 104,000 euros. Fines phase in over three years. Controllers outside Moldova that serve or monitor people there have to appoint a local representative.